Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

There's no higher praise than "I built my own; yours was better"!

Here's that earlier thread - thanks for pointing it out!

Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466470 - June 2020 (128 comments)

Thanks!

Awesome dude

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Dan, thank you! I has been fun competing with you.

I remember the golden days :)

I've been following your journey post Optimizely! Hope your new ventures turn out to be equally fun and fulfilling.

Optimizely as in Episerver?? I thought Optimizely was Episerver's rebrand.

Why "was"?

As a fellow marketer I've totally done similar stuff to send messages to whomever is digging through their utms.

More usefully though, you can learn a shocking amount about a company from their utms and event data.

How does one copy SEM strategy? How do you reverse engineer based on ads and utm_tags? How do I even know that you are doing it right so it's worth copying?

I good with API docs and weird bugs but this is beyond me.

Haha, I'll ask around if they ever figured out the query parameters :)

wanna join Rezi? we dont have a marketing team but get 4K signups a day

I should have guessed this was your handle Rob :) I listen to your podcast whenever I need a boost, but somehow never made the connection that you are one of "us", here.

If you'd like to get some scandi guys on your show, I am a GP at www.likeminded.vc, and connected into the community around Copenhagen and the nordics.

Awesome! Yes, indeed 16 years is a long period. But I was lucky to have been exposed to HN during the early years. I remember interacting with you!

This was my 5th startup. During my college days I kept launching startups (Kroomsa, Precimark, MyJugaad.in). Failure of all these made me introspect and I realized I was trapped into the engineer's fallacy: build things without knowing or caring about how to market them. This pushed me to learn marketing and I fell deeper into the rabbit hole.

So, my next attempt was build a marketing suite as I was learning a lot about what works and what doesn't. But even that turned out to be a dud as I put too many features into it. But I did launch it on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 and got a few users.

Users found the UX too complicated and I got feedback to focus on 1 among the 10s of features I had added. See this comment by @patio11

>because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screen

So as my next iteration, I picked A/B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A/B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A/B tests without being reliant on developers.

This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!

Thanks for linking it here.

If there are any AI researchers or engineers in Bangalore/India lurking here, please consider applying.

I attended Paras’a talk at the last graduation day for the residency. I’m amazed at how he was able to do all that, while dealing with the acquisition due diligence.

It's not a dumb question.

But what I learned in this process is that companies are valued after incorporating many factors (liquidity, earnouts, future involvement, growth rate, profit, retention, current market mood, etc. etc.) and multiples we see reported in media are obviously sit at the outlier curves.

I got a good deal overall (not just monetarily), and that's what I was shooting for.

Annual growth rate is typically a big factor in PE acquisition multiples. At a 4x multiple of ARR, I’d hazard a guess that this was on the lower side.

at $20mil profit, that's a 40% margin, which is quite high, even for a tech company (tho for a startup, which can be nimble and agile, it's not impossible).

What would you like to know about the process?

My co-founder is continuing and so is rest of the leadership team. So, I'm expecting company and its culture to remain as is.

It depends on the type of private equity too. There are absolutely firms that want to milk a profitable business by shutting down investment.

There are others that are all about growth.

Just as a counter point, private equity seems to have helped WPEngine become so successful that Mullenweg has totally lost his mind over it.

Stylistic note: "knell" is a word for a sound, like the ringing of a solemn type of bell.

So something can't be said to "spell a death knell".

The TechCrunch article the OP linked above mentions this:

> Chopra, who owned 71% of Wingify before the acquisition, will retain a minority stake in the firm, one of the sources said.

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Yes, thank you! I was indeed sleeping and just woke up.

I think the low was covid - with budget cuts, we had a sudden revenue drop and didn't know when or whether it will recover at all. But thankfully as we had been profitable from day 1, we didn't lay off anyone.

The high is every time we launched a new feature that set the industry standard. (For example, integrating heatmaps into A/B tests and migration from frequentist to bayesian statistics).

Another high has always been our annual international trips - we had been taking our entire company to a vacation every year. As a company, Wingify team has vacationed together in Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Nepal, and Goa. Most recently, ~400 people partied together on a boat in Bangkok, and it was a high!

Yes, Google discontinuing their A/B testing tool was a surprise (but a pleasant one obviously).

CRO over the last 15 years has shifted in maturity. It started with testing red v/s green buttons in 2010 but now it is a full blown science with observations, hypothesis, prioritisation, experimentation and personalization!